February moves fast, doesn’t it? One moment, the year is stretching open before us, the next we’re caught in its current. This post should have been up a little bit earlier, but sometimes, time slips through the cracks. Maybe that’s fitting, because today I want to talk about contradictions. About holding two truths in your hand and letting them breathe.
Because, ultimately, that is what life is, isn’t it? A constant pull between what is, what was and what could be. Between longing and contentment, between hope and hesitation, between the fire that burns inside to push us forward and the quiet voice inside that asks us to rest.
Lately, I have been thinking about the contradictions I hold inside. The paradoxes that shape the person I am, the dualities I live with but rarely mention.
I crave the quiet but also love deep conversations. I want to be understood, to have my words reach the core of someone else’s soul, yet I hide in the margins, watching from a safe distance. And then there is my art. I am both its creator and its prisoner. I hold complete control over every aspect of it, but I am also at its mercy. Bound by the way inspiration arrives or doesn’t. I shape it, but it shapes me too.
I think we all hold these contradictions in some shape or form. The quiet battles of what we want and what we fear. Between who we are and who we are becoming. Maybe that is what makes us human, what makes us whole. Today I want to dive into holding these contradictions.
The Art of Holding Contradictions
February carries with it an expectation, at least in my experience, love. The world wraps this month in ribbons and roses, selling us the idea that love is a certainty. That love should be soft, warm, effortless. Or so that’s what they want us to believe, that it is supposed to be easy, natural, something that just flows without hesitation or doubt, but the truth is love is rarely just one thing. Love is also the ache of distance, as much as it is the comfort of closeness. It is reaching for someone who is no longer there, a sweet promise resting on the edge of a betrayal that might still be healing. It is the silence on the other end of the phone, the echo of a name spoken in the emptiness of a room.
We talk about love as something we fall into, as though it is an inevitability. But what about the love we resist? Love is the way we crave connection, the way we also push it away. It is devotion but also destruction. It is in the hand reaching out and the fear of being touched, the longing to be seen and the horror of being fully known. It is a wound that is still healing the places we’ve been hurt before. The fears we carry even as we let someone in. Love does not erase history, it holds it, carries it and helps us move forward.
Every connection is a layer of the past and present of longing and restraint. The fire that keeps us warm, but also the one that has the potential to consume us fully. It is the thing that makes us whole and the thing that leaves us shattered. Sometimes love is grand, sweeping gestures, but other times, love is simply the act of staying when everything else tells you to run.
But love is not only found in romance. Love is too big, too intricate to be confined to just one shape. The love of a late night conversation, the kind that makes the world feel smaller and more intimate. The love of solitude, of existing in a quiet space that belongs only to you? The love we pour into our art, the way we return to the page, the canvas, the instrument, again and again, even when it doesn’t always love us back? It is the small rituals that keep us steady. The way we make tea or coffee in the morning, or the way we dress ourselves. Sometimes love is as much about absence as it is about presence, the love of someone we have lost, the love still remains after the person is gone. It is in the unspoken words, the things we have left unsaid and the spaces we hold inside long after they have been emptied.
Love is just as much about presence as it is about loss. It is not just the people who are here, but the ones who remain in the quiet, or perhaps even the broken, spaces of the heart. Love is what we hold onto, even when time tries to take it away from us.
Love and art are woven from the same contradictions. Creativity, too, is filled with tension, with the push and pull of inspiration and struggle. We create from both abundance and emptiness. Some days the words flow as if they have been waiting to let out. Other days, we wrestle them onto the page, each line a battle all on its own. And yet, both of those kinds of days matter. Both create something real, something meaningful. We create from inspiration and from frustration.
Some of the best art is born from the collision of these opposites, born from tension, from light and shadow. The greatest works often come forth not from certainty but from doubt. To create is to exist in a state of duality. To be both sure and unsure, to love and to doubt, to be in motion and yet stuck in place.
Maybe, that is what makes it beautiful, makes it worthwhile. The way we press forward, even in that uncertainty. The way we reach for meaning, even when we don’t know yet what we are trying to say. The way we create from love, from longing, poetry from pain, art from the places that ache. Maybe the most powerful thing we can do is to hold those contradictions without the need to resolve them. To let love and all its facets be both a presence and an absence. To let the creativity, or life in general, be both effortless and difficult. To allow ourselves to exist in the space between the knowing and the unknowing.
And maybe it is in that space that we find something real.
What contradictions are you holding right now? Are you creating from a place of love and longing, or something else entirely? Let’s talk about it in the comments, or, of course, on Discord.
Love,
Sofia
Originally posted on Patreon
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